[netcdfgroup] Structure at the file level?

[Rick Hedin]

Greetings! 

I am making an information collector that will collect information from 
a bunch of processes on a bunch of machines.  Initially, each process 
will write to it's own file on it's machine.  Eventually, each process 
will contribute to a collector process on one machine using UDP. 

I'd like to use netCDF because of its self-describing nature, and 
because the information is uniform across machine architectures.  But I 
wonder if netCDF can interpret a record in isolation, or if it depends 
on an overall file structure.  I will end up with one big file 
containing records from a bunch of different sources. 

If a netCDF file is just a few records of common header information at 
the top, followed by a bunch of records, each of which is in an allowed 
format, but which are not in any particular order, I don't anticipate 
any problems. 

Has anybody collected records from a bunch of sources and put them all 
together in one file? 


             Regards,

             Rick

-- 
Rick Hedin
Tradelink LLC
Tel:312.264.2110
Email:rickh at trdlnk.com